We usually think of ourselves as the planet’s apex life-form, but we’re really just feeble newcomers on this globe. Other life-forms have been around far longer.
Bacteria, for example, emerged nearly 4 billion years ago, and these “simple” organisms exist in every conceivable environment. We can find them floating on air currents miles high in the atmosphere, where they are the dominant form of life and their presence helps clouds form. At the other extreme, miles deep under the Earth’s surface, bacterial species subsist in communities powered by radioactive decay.
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Targeted Immunotherapies Poised for Breakthrough
Increasingly, the great new medical technologies aren’t coming from the pharmaceutical behemoths, but from scrappy little biotech upstarts. In few instances is this truer than in the field of cancer immunotherapy.
Immunotherapy is defined as a “treatment designed to produce immunity to disease or enhance the resistance of the immune system to an active disease process, as cancer.” Simply put, cancer immunotherapy activates the body’s powerful and complex immune system so that it can do its job better.
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